This morning, Michael left for camp. It sounds like it will be a fun camp, though I can understand that he has some trepidation. After all, they’re hiking in the Flinders Rangers and have to carry everything with them. That means that all the water that they’ll be drinking for three days is weighing down his back pack. Part of me wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he’d drunk 5 litres of water today just so that he didn’t have to lug it the entire distance.
I wasn’t impressed when the 7:30am drop off that I was expecting this morning was shifted to a 6am drop off, especially because that meant getting out of bed at 5:20am on a day when I would be driving several hundred kilometres for work.
We chucked the back pack in the car and headed off to the school only to have Michael say 5 minutes up the road that he had forgotten his packed lunch. Given that we were on something of a tight time line to get him there on time, I advised him that he’d just have to dip into the additional muesli bars that he’d taken along and deal with it.
It was all good until we got to the school, drove inside and found that there wasn’t a single, bus, teacher, student or parent anywhere to be seen. We quickly whipped around to the alternate entrance, but there was still no sign of anyone. I started questioning Michael as to whether he could have the time wrong, or the location only to find out that he wasn’t sure. So we called Caroline at home because the piece of paper we needed wasn’t in his locker and was suspected to be on the floor of his bedroom.
Well guess what? It wasn’t there. What was there however was the cutlery, plate and tea towel that Michael was supposed to have packed with his gear. At this point the emergency measures kicked in and Caroline put together a lunch, grabbed his remaining gear and set off to deliver it even though we were still unsure as to whether we were in the right place or not.
Fortunately in the time that it took Caroline to get there other people slowly started to arrive and when the first bus showed up I think we both breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Caroline made it in time and off we went, abandoning him to his adventure.
I just hope the raspy throat that he said he woke up with doesn’t turn into the flu that seemed to have hit Caroline over the weekend given that I’ve been driving somewhat close to the Flinders Ranges today and have seen nothing but patches of light to very heavy rain. With the weight of all the food that Michael packed, I’m not sure that he was overly generous with the whole clothing concept!
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